I noticed he sometimes made jokes when he was sad.
I put the phone down.“So that’s why you were staying at a shelter after you and Trish split?Because you didn’t have anywhere else to go?Nobody was looking out for you?”
“I was looking out for me.”
A lot of things I’d noticed before made sense now.
“Having second thoughts about me?”he said.
“Fuck no, Eddie.How could you think that?It just...hurts to think of you all alone.”
“I’m not alone now.”
“You didn’t have to be alone back then.You could have come to me.Even if you never wanted to be with me like that, I still would have helped you.You know that, right?”
My phone vibrated again: Bexley.
I read the text out loud, “‘Congrats.Gonna take you two out on the town.’”
I put the phone on the counter.He came close to me, ducked his head, and kissed me.I kissed him back.
It was getting late.
“I gotta start dinner.”
“You want help?”
“No.It’s stew.It’s easy.”I’d bought precut meat and baby carrots, so the only thing to chop was an onion.I put everything into a pot with some stock and got it simmering.He was sitting on the couch with my laptop open on the coffee table, so I joined him.
“It’ll be ready in forty minutes.”I set the timer on my phone.“What are you watching?”
“I found my honey commercial on YouTube.Picture quality sucks.You still want to watch it?”
“Yeah.”
He clicked play, and there he was running down a gravel road in a chunky yellow sweater, laughing.I couldn’t explain how I felt, seeing him that young, wishing we’d met when we were kids and grown up together.All that time lost before we met.
“You look twelve.”
“They wanted someone who looked like a kid but could sign a contract.I was nineteen.”
“Thank god.I thought I was turning into a pervert.Did they dye your hair?”It was golden blond in the commercial.Now, it was dark blond, almost brown, like mine.
“No.The sun bleached it over the summer.”
“God, you’re adorable.If I saw you back then, I would’ve fallen in love on the spot.”And I’d have had less of a chance with him than I’d had when I first met him.I was a skinny nerdy virgin back then.
The video showed him running across a field full of orange flowers, wearing an orange T-shirt and flying a kite.The commercial’s jingle played over his laugh.
“When we started, it was early morning,” he said.“But then it got hot, and I had to keep running back and forth across that field until they got the take they wanted.I had to change my shirt three times.”
“Yeah, you look pretty hot.”
He snorted, and I put my arm around him.
In the next scene, he was drizzling buttered toast with a honey wand, with the sunlight shining through the thread of honey.He took a big bite of the toast.
“Now I want to eat honey,” I said.
